ABSTRACT
It is precisely in view of the crucial question that Jacques Lacan undertook, beginning in the mid-1950s, his examination of Sigmund Freud's work. Lacan's seminar "The Partial Drive and Its Circuit" (1964) can shed some light on this issue. He first argues that any drive is sexual and, moreover, necessarily partial, in view of sexuality's biological end: procreation. Reconsidering the place of auto-eroticism in the drive circuit, Lacan emphasizes the necessary localization in one's own body of the beginning and end of drive. It is to the credit of Andre Green that he was able to promote this idea of drive passivation, which plays a key role in the process of genuine subjectivation. This chapter suggests that we envision the Lacanian model of the drive circuit as a sort of motor whose energetic back-and-forth movement would be produced by the continuous succession of three stages: active, passive, and auto-erotic. Freud might have liked such a thermodynamic metaphor.
